No one understands and explains the Age of the Business Idiot better than Ed Zitron

Zitron is one of the essential critics of the AI bubble. He is the essential critic of the business and finance side of the story which is where the really egregious stuff is going on. His newsletter is smart, angry, fearless and free.

We will be coming back to this and discussing how the story Zitron is telling about the AI bubble is intertwined with our humanoid robot thread (with many of the same names popping up in both contexts).

Society berated people for "quiet quitting," a ghastly euphemism for “doing the job as specified in your employment contract,” in 2022 because journalism is enthralled by the management class, and because the management class has so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what "labor" means that people got called lazy for literally doing their jobs. The middle manager brain doesn't see a worker as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as an asset that must provide a return. As a result, if another asset comes along that could potentially provide a bigger return — like an offshore worker, or an AI agent — that middle manager won’t hesitate to drop them. 

Artificial intelligence is the ultimate panacea for the Business Idiot — a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the Business Idiot themselves. The Information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott — the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over $200 billion, despite the fact that, like SalesForce, nobody really knows what it does  — chose to push AI across his whole organization (both in product and in practice) based on the mental consideration I'd usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object:

When ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, McDermott joined his executives around a boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there, he made a quick decision. “Bill’s like, ‘Let me make it clear to everybody here, everything you do: AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,’” recalled Tzitzon, the ServiceNow vice chair. To begin a customer meeting on AI, McDermott has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to their best impression of him: Present AI not as a matter of bots or databases but in grand-sounding terms, like “business transformation. During the push to grow AI, McDermott has insisted his managers improve efficiency across their teams. He is laser-focused on a sales team’s participation rate. “Let’s assume you’re a manager, and you have 12 direct reports,” he said. “Now let’s assume out of those 12, two people did good, which was so good that the manager was 110% of plan. I don’t think that’s good. I tell the manager: ‘What did the other 10 do?’”

You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean "efficiency"? What does that quote even mean? 110% of plan? What're you on about? Did you hit your head on something Bill?

I'd wager Bill is concussion-free — and an example of a true Business Idiot — a person with incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on knowing stuff or caring about his customers, but on the latest shiny thing that makes him think "line go up." No, really, that's Bill McDermott's thing. Back in 2022, he said to Yahoo Finance the metaverse was "real" and that ServiceNow could help someone "create an e-mall in the metaverse" and have a futuristic store of some sort. One might wonder how ServiceNow provided that, and the answer is it didn't. I cannot find a single product that it’s offered that includes it.